


aqualung

by orphan_account



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon Compliant Magic, Depression, Friendship, M/M, Multi, Past Abuse, Polyamory, Sometime after the events of BLLB, polyamory negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 01:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17633192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Thank you for reading.Comments are welcome. Please leave kudos if you enjoy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.  
> Comments are welcome. Please leave kudos if you enjoy.

Ronan met Kavinsky in a dream.

 

In a forest with a disorienting resemblance to Cabeswater, Kavinsky stood in a rambling thicket overgrown with charred brambles, a thorned headpiece encircling his dark hair. Arrows, drawing up dried welts of blood, stuck out from his bare stomach and ribs. A white cloth adorned his waist, the garment’s arrangement over his intimate parts fashioned with an intricacy Ronan doubted Kavinsky had mastered on his own.

 

He himself appeared in the attire of a bard from someone’s tabletop role-playing campaign; a shredded cloak of evergreen, hooded and thick-sleeved, was thrown on over a fetching tunic and surprisingly warm grey breeches. Strangely, his beloved boots covered his feet. In his right hand, he carried a flute crafted from bone.

 

“Welcome to my mindfuck,” he said, by way of greeting.

 

Kavinsky, uncharacteristically, didn’t dignify this with a response. “Why didn’t you tell me you go for the hella boring types like Parrish?”

 

Clenching his fist around the flute, Ronan snapped the instrument’s spine.

 

Kavinsky said, “Didn’t his dad try to kill him, too? Why set yourself up for more of that fucking tragedy?”

 

Laughing, the sound joyless and spiteful, Ronan kicked up a brittle mound of earth.

 

“Why did you want me, Joseph?”

 

A sardonic smile played over Kavinsky’s lips. His hooded eyes glimmered. “Don’t go there, Lynch.”

 

“If you say I wasn’t boring, didn’t say I wanted to fuck you, we’re done.”

 

His voice took on a matter-of-fact, irreverent tone, as though he read from a care label on his biker jacket.

 

“Even if I’d been into you, no chance you would’ve noticed.”

 

Approaching Kavinsky, he walked the fingers of his left hand up an arrow protruding from his ribs before deftly plucking it out.

 

“High as a kite all the goddamn time.”

 

Tensing, Kavinsky snared a bruising grip around Ronan’s wrist. “Ever wonder why?”

 

“Call it even; we don’t go there either.”

 

“ _Ronan._ ”

 

Again, his name sounded momentous, biblical, worthy of a storyteller. His father had chosen his name so very deliberately. It was a name whispered on the wind through soundless forests, heard by weary travelers herded towards safekeeping. It was a name cried by terrorized lovers, in awe of a boundless wellspring beyond a name. It was a spell invoked by warriors on frosted mountainsides before they charged into battle, their lover’s calls echoing over the peaks like a mournful foghorn.

 

He wanted to hear his name from someone else.

 

“Adam is not fucking boring,” he said, ripping himself from Kavinsky’s clenched fingers. “You shouldn’t have done what you did. It’s a long-term fix for a short-term problem.”

 

“Uh huh,” Kavinsky said, rolling his eyes. “Depression doesn’t fuck around with you and decide it’s not worth your time. You’re its bitch till the end. You’re its favorite masochist till your playing becomes your life.”

 

Ronan laughed, a crooked, stuttering sound. “Why didn’t you talk to me?”

 

“Did you miss my fucking trying? Oh, yeah, wait.”

 

As though he’d reasoned with himself and decided his deduction was up to par, he nodded.

 

“You were too busy fucking Gansey Three to recognize my efforts.”

 

He threw both the broken flute and arrow at Kavinsky’s head. They vanished, becoming memories of the netherworld surrounding the thicket, the forest and its inhabitants. Seething, Ronan said, “You’re not worth an explanation. Forget it.”

 

Kavinsky smiled. “Bye, Lynch.”

 

He began to disappear incrementally, becoming the same shadowed smudge of evanescence as Ronan’s dear, dead friend.

 

“Wait. Kavinsky, fucking _wait_.”

 

And then the forest flickered before twitching off.

 

-

 

Ronan woke up to Adam studying him.

 

On his mattress in his room at St. Agnes, the world (their world) grew small, snug enough for Ronan to burrow himself inside. Naked aside from black boxers, he sank his limbs around Adam’s back, inhaling the warmth of him, treasuring the sureness of his beating, breathing life.

 

Sleepily, Adam drifted toward him. “Why did you say his name?”

 

Banishing the dream from both of their minds overtook him. Adam, reading his eyes, closed their mouths in a kiss.

 

A distinct unreality plagued him; their movements, playacted, suspended themselves above Ronan’s head in a theatrical phantasmagoria. The beauty of the trembling mirage, however, in no way compared to Adam, his mouth accommodating Ronan’s fretful urgency, his stomach clenching as Ronan cried into his open mouth.

 

 _“Hey_.” Sitting up on his knees, Adam fixed Ronan’s hand between dried palms.

 

“We fucking need to keep talking to each other.”

 

Adam’s gaze shone with a wrenching clarity. “We need to tell Gansey about us.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. Comments are welcome.

“Doesn’t Gansey already get it?” Noah said.

 

He and Blue held dominion over Monmouth Manufacturing in the interim of Gansey’s and Ronan’s prolonged and blaring absence. They were laboriously handling the renewed magnificence of Gansey’s cardboard Henrietta, a vinyl relic crooning about meeting again on sunny days coloring their thoughts with a fading timelessness.

 

Blue considered Noah’s question with a playful smirk. “Adam’s gotta say it. Gansey’s been waiting forever to hear the truth from someone besides Ronan.”

 

Frowning, Noah smoothed a fingertip along the cardboard roof of Nino’s. “Why say it at all? Gansey knows we’re all in love with each other; why make a sit-down deal of it?”

 

It was so heartbreakingly like Noah, Blue thought, to reason that the fundamental workings of the word needed no actualization in the form of more words. Noah demonstrated the deconstructed essence of the word through action alone. That, when Blue really thought about it, explained how her own fondness for him seeped out through her heart, her ribcage and lungs in a pact of blood beyond binding.

 

“Adam needs to put it out there so he can rest. It can’t be easy for him, holding the truth of two best friends pledging their lives to him, and him sharing their dream besides.”

 

“So Adam wants them to stop pretending they’re okay with monogamy,” Noah said. “Gotcha.”

 

“It’s their deal. Let them figure it out.”

 

All at once, Blue was full to overflowing with gratitude for the wisdom Calla had bestowed on herself and Maura the night before in the Phone/Cat/Sewing room: that her boys loved her but also (and in particular the king, the snake and the magician) each other.

 

“Okay,” Noah said, a sigh rippling over his bottom lip. He tangled one hand in the crochet pattern of Blue’s periwinkle sweater.

 

“They’ve got history,” Blue said, one eyebrow dancing. “We’ve got our own.”

 

-

 

Gansey said, “Why are we fighting about this?”

 

Adam sounded hoarse. “We’re not fighting about this.”

 

“Explain this, then.”

 

 _This_ , Adam reasoned, was Ronan’s fault. He had opted for standing beside Adam, in front of Adam’s mattress, somehow shrinking the size of the room in St. Agnes to a dimming blip on a switchboard. Ronan had that effect on his environment. Gansey, ever the diplomat, stood apart from them while facing the sliver of space between them. He gazed meaningfully at Adam, his wireframes fogging with condensation.

 

“I didn’t mean to set this up like a stand-off,” Adam said. His voice ran away with his words, tumbling them into a blurred passage: “It’s unnecessary, anyway.”

 

Of course Gansey heard him. The wrinkles around his eyes hardened as he said, “How does that account for this morning, then?”

 

They’d been in Adam’s room since Gansey had knocked and Ronan had let him in, the both of them still unclothed at that point, the breathtaking chill of the early morning snaking tendrils through the open window. As he and Ronan had slowly gathered their clothing from the swept floor and dressed in tandem, Adam had allowed the silence to swarm through Gansey’s thoughts. Ronan had mercifully gone along with this plan.

 

Now, though, Adam needed his bold, dauntless voice to cut through the introspection. It was weird, Ronan enveloping the both of them in the unearthly, shocking spell of his eyes, withholding the clear, ageless pipe of his voice from beckoning them forth.

 

“You going to contribute or what?” Adam said.

 

“You’re more important to me than myself.”

 

Nothing had prepared him for that amount of honesty. Adam closed his eyes, expecting Cabeswater, almost begging it to entwine its vines around his wrists, summon the scent of earth trodden underfoot, enclose him in a dense fug of birdsong and evergreen.

 

He opened his eyes. Yep, Ronan was there, gazing at him, the shocking radiance of his eyes all the more unsettling now. Adam’s throat closed up.

 

“Same with you, Dick,” Ronan said, same snide toying with the insult and name in his voice as he beheld Gansey’s leveled stare. “Can we move on, Parrish?”

 

Adam’s words stunned him: “That’s not the right way to start a relationship.”

 

Ronan swore.

 

“Okay,” he said, “ _now_ we’re fighting.”

 

“Adam’s right, Ronan,” Gansey said.

 

Cabeswater lured him back, granting him a clandestine entryway into Ronan’s thoughts: how Gansey endlessly agreed with Adam, especially in matters where Ronan was concerned, as if they knew him better than he knew himself. Did they? By now, maybe.

 

Ronan tugged at the five leather bands encircling his wrist, something glittering in the painful, mesmeric beauty of his eyes. Adam remembered the hateful name Ronan murmured on his skin. Cabeswater blackened around his vision, evergreen smoldering into a dull, burnt sheen.

 

“We need you to care about you,” Gansey was saying. “Along with us.”

 

“I’m _fucking_ learning,” Ronan said.

 

Cabeswater began to recede.

 

Adam grabbed Ronan’s hand. Snagging his fingers, Ronan cut his nails into Adam’s dried palm.

 

“We’re all learning right now, Gansey. Some of us for the first time.”

 

 _He didn’t have to bring that up. Cabeswater reemerged, dragging him further back, past the canopy of pine and evergreen, past the melodic birdsong. The aftershock of each hit, the absence of memory, of time, of any one space he inhabited, all came pouring back through him. And then a blissful emptiness as Cabeswater entwined him in the gentle shelter of unrelenting wonder_.

 

They held him. Adam fell into them.

 

“We are going to spend this time caring for one another,” Gansey said. Adam sank his hand into his. Ronan kissed his head. “Think on it.”

 

The trees whispered, in Latin, on the wind. They heard the words, and they believed them.

 

Adam thought them conquerors.


End file.
